Where One Can Go To Eat in London

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19373, 10 July 1937, Page 9

Where One Can Go To Eat in London

jyjll. Thomas Burke's honk on “Eating Round the World in Loudon" will appeal to anyone contemplating a trip to England, for it gives a brief glance at the many ways and means of dining in London from the fashionable and famous restaurants in the West End, through tho various grillrooms, the assorted nationalities ot' Soho, to the chop-houses and modern shack bars.

To visit one of the old eatinghouses of London and not to know something of its history and the origin of its unique feature is to miss half the pleasure of the meal. .Mr. Burke knows his London, old and new from east to west, and his way of introducing us to the great variety of restaurants in London is as delightful as a book of I ravel. Old English Fare New Zealanders seem to be very mistaken in their conception of old English fare as roast beef, roast mutton, and beer. The dishes served in the taverns of the late sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were more varied than those of our best restaurants to-day. (lervasc Markham's notion of a little dinner—just a casual occasion among intimate friends—is hair-raising to the modern housewife: “Shield of brawn; boiled capon; boiled beef; roast beef, roast pig; baked ohewets; roast goose; roast swan; roast, turkey; roast venison; pastry of venison; roast kid, stuffed with dumpling; olive-pie; custard of doussets; with, as side-dishes, salads, fricassees, marzipanc, pastries." dust a ‘ ‘ little dinner! ’ ’ Many of the dishes that once pleased kings and nobles and poets have been banished from the cuisine of modern London restaurants, but it is interesting to learn that; in certain rural districts of England some of these may still be laid. Squab-pie, mentioned in Kingsley’s “ Ilerevvard the Wake," is still cooked in Cornwall; saffron-cakes, too. Frumenty mav be got in Devizes and Stoke-on-Trent. Where To Go Dinner in London may lie had at all prices, lint to dine, the author says, one must expect to pay something more than in Paris, if a little less than in New York. But where to go.' From the earliest days of London restaurants there lias always been, at a given time, one restaurant that is the restaurant.

Mr. Burke considers that this position has for the hist few years been given by general consent to Quaglino’s in Bury street —though he does not expect till his readers to agree with him. Jit the immediate neighbourhood is ITunier’s, which comes, of course, from the I’rnnier’s of Paris. Quinto’s in Arlington street, the San Marco in Mayfair place, Le Coq d 'Or in Stratton street, with its great roasting pits in open view, where you have your bird cooked in your presence." Of all these, the author considers such past masters as Oronow and Thomas Moore would highly ap prove.